13th-18th November 2018
Aberystwyth Arts Centre, Wales
We were away at
Abertoir horror film festival in Wales last week. We've been wanting to go to the festival for ages, but this year was the first time that work commitments (pretty much) allowed it. And I'm so glad that we were able to make it this year - what a brilliant festival! Abertoir is a warm and welcoming festival, and within a few hours of arriving we really felt at home. But it's also a well-organized event, and the programme is very well put together. I was really impressed by the thought that clearly went into this year's line-up: a good selection of classics complimented new releases and a couple of UK premieres... and a few genuine surprises too.
Abertoir is a six-day festival, so we saw a LOT of films. And a lot of these are recommendations, so I'm planning to review all the titles we saw in November. To make it a bit more manageable, I'm going to do the review in three parts. First up... here are the films we saw on
Tuesday and Wednesday.
Tuesday 13th November
As this was the thirteenth Abertoir festival, and
Friday the 13th was on the menu, the whole festival had a slasher theme, with some interesting selections made from the subgenre. The first screening was
Sleepaway Camp – which set a quirky, off-beat tone to the proceedings.
Sleepaway Camp is a cult classic, niche even by slasher standards, and I was surprised to find that even my horror aficionado husband had never heard of it (and it was quite the challenge not to let any spoilers slip beforehand). It’s hard to know what to say about
Sleepaway Camp to do justice to its off-key mix of high camp and horror tropes. The film begins with a happy day out on the lake turning to tragedy, as a family is mown down by a rogue speedboat. A father and child are killed, but another child survives. Fast forward eight years, and we’re at Camp Arawak for the summer. Awkward teen Angela is attending the camp for the first time with her cousin Ricky. Angela is painfully shy and so is mercilessly bullied by Queen Bee Judy and malicious counsellor Meg. But an unseen killer is picking off teens (mostly the more unpleasant ones). Camp owner Mel Costic – apparently taking a page from
Jaws’ Mayor Larry Vaughn’s playbook – is determined to brush off the violent murders to ensure the summer continues as planned, but the killings just don’t stop. The whole thing builds to a climax that has to be seen to be believed, and which will leave you questioning if this is exploitation, innovation or something somewhere in between. Chock-full of 80s fashion disasters (such tight shorts! such high side ponytails!), hammy acting and murdered teens,
Sleepaway Camp is a wild ride. And it was a great start to our first Abertoir festival.
The first new film of the festival was
In Fabric. In a nutshell, this is a film about a haunted dress. But that brief summary does a disservice to Strickland’s highly stylized – often overwhelmingly so – and sometimes disturbing critique of consumerism. The film introduces us to Sheila, a downtrodden single mother to a teen son, who has a boring job in a bank and uses a lonely hearts dating service. Sheila buys a dress from a ubiquitous but sinister department store – and things go badly wrong. Again, this doesn’t really do justice to how Strickland’s film unfolds. In many ways, it is the aesthetic – rather than the plot – which is most important here. Firstly, the film plays around with ostensibly ‘period’ detail and anachronism (a telling example: Sheila has an analogue tape answerphone, but a phone number that begins ‘01’), creating a feeling of timelessness, but not in a reassuring or positive way. Secondly, the film’s design is both minutely detailed and gloriously overblown: Sheila’s place of work and uniform are intricately mundane, which contrasts with the Gothic Victoriana of the department store’s creepy assistants. Other contrasts are used to strong effect in the film, such as dialogue (the juxtaposition of the stilted, comical awkwardness of Sheila’s dates, the daft management speak of her bosses, and the uncomfortable verbosity of the shop assistants) and tone (the contrast of sad silliness during the dates with the Grand Guignol-esque blood and disturbing eroticism in the department store after hours). Does this work? Mostly – yes, I think it does.
In Fabric isn’t a horror narrative as such, but it utilizes generic story elements and visual tropes to undeniably powerful effect. My criticism would be that it’s somewhat overlong and loses its pacing once Sheila’s story ends and the dress acquires a new owner.
Piercing is an adaptation of Ryū Murakami’s 1994 novel of the same name (translated into English in 2007). It’s the story of Reed, a married man with a young child, who fantasises about killing a woman with an ice pick. Admittedly, in the opening scenes, I did have doubts about whether this film was for me. The last horror film festival we went to (way back in 2015) became a bit of chore, as it felt like every single film we saw featured (sexual, gratuitous) violence against women. When Reed sets about making his fantasy a reality, checking into a hotel and testing out the effects of chloroform, I had a sinking feeling things were heading in the same direction. Oh me of little faith!
Piercing was going to take us on a
very different journey. Reed hires an escort – Jackie (played brilliantly by Mia Wasikowska) – who arrives at his hotel room, uncomfortable and awkward. Her client, too, is uncomfortable and awkward, and the audience waits for the violence to begin… But then the film takes an unexpected turn, when Jackie’s own psychological issues come to the surface. The film’s design is stylish (and stylized – though not to the same extent as
In Fabric), and the back-and-forth between the two protagonists also has a sense of choreographed style (although we see some other characters, this is essentially a two-hander) that flips the script from predator-prey to a twisted pas de deux. Nevertheless, this is not a character study – we learn little about Reed, and even less about Jackie. Instead, Piercing emerges as a viciously glossy, but also funny and touching, tale of two messed-up people finding a way to deal with their mess. No spoilers, but I found the ending (and particularly the last line) really quite a satisfying conclusion.
Sadly, our stamina isn't what it used to be, so we had to skip the final screening of the day in favour of sleep. The last film on Tuesday was
Puppet Master: The Littlest Reich (dir. Tommy Wiklund and Sonny Laguna, 2018).
Wednesday 14th November
First film of Wednesday was
The Tokoloshe, a South African horror inspired by a creature from Zulu mythology. Busi (Petronella Tshuma) is a poor young woman who arrives in Johannesburg looking for work. She manages to get a job at a run-down hospital, but is immediately beset both by the supernatural malevolence of the tokoloshe that’s apparently menacing the hospital’s children’s ward, and by the more human threat of a predatory boss. Desperate for money so that she can ‘save’ her sister, Busi is forced to stay at the hospital as things become increasingly violent and frightening. I really enjoyed
The Tokoloshe – it was very skilful in its evocation of Gothic horror and the claustrophobia of Busi’s situation. The film’s bilingual (English/Zulu) dialogue also worked very well, with Busi’s isolation being conjured through the continued pressure to speak English to those in authority. One particular scene, when Busi attempts to flee on a bus, really highlighted the way language works in the film, with her English pleas to the bus driver falling on deaf ears before a voice offers assistance in Zulu – even as an Anglophone I felt the sheer relief that came with hearing Busi’s own language spoken. If I had a criticism of the film, it would be that it tries to do a little too much. The horror set pieces in the hospital are very well done, but these are only part of the story. Busi and her sister’s backstory is also revealed through flashback, and there is commentary on social and economic issues in Johannesburg as well. At times, it feels like the film tries to tell too many stories and this affects pacing. Nevertheless, the ending does an excellent job of bringing the threads together and revealing the underlying truth of the horror assailing Busi.
Occult Bolshevism is a Japanese film, written and directed by Hiroshi Takahashi (the writer of
Ringu). Our screening was prefixed by a short recorded interview by Takahashi, where he spoke of being inspired by classic British ghost stories (in the writing of both
Ringu and
Occult Bolshevism). We also had a brief intro from the festival organizers, who said that – despite being written by the same man – the film we were about to watch was definitely not in the same vein of horror as his more famous work. I’ll admit I was quite glad about that, because – shock horror! – I’m not really a fan of
Ringu (don’t @ me). The organizers were right, though.
Occult Bolshevism is a quite different type of tale – and I really enjoyed it. As part of a forbidden experiment into psychological/paranormal phenomena (it’s not made explicitly clear at the start what the nature of the experiment is), a group of people come together in an apparently abandoned industrial facility. As with classic ghost stories, they each take it in turn to tell their own tale of supernatural experience, which are recorded/monitored. But all this is being conducted under looming portraits of Communist leaders and is prefaced with a group rendition of the Bolshevik Party Anthem – and throughout the film the experiment is couched in terms of ‘spiritual revolution’.
Occult Bolshevism is a weird and off-kilter ghost story that carries you along for its ride. I’m not going to pretend that I fully understand the ending, but it’s certainly a dramatic and unsettling climax that draws together disparate elements of the stories previously told. For me, the film was at its most powerful when the experiment’s participants narrated their tales – sparsely shot and without diegetic music, these sequences perfectly captured the essence of the ghost story.
And now for a bit of an ‘event screening’. Abertoir have a tradition of holding off-site screenings during their annual festivals – it was one of the things that initially caught our attention about their programme. This year, in-keeping with this year’s theme, it was a screening of
Friday the 13th Part 3 in 3D at a remote barn in the Welsh countryside (well, not entirely remote – but let’s not worry too much about that). We were advised to wrap up warm, transported to the location by coach, and then given hockey masks with 3D glasses attached (a brilliant little touch, although given my hairdo and spectacles, I sadly had to detach my glasses so I could actually wear them). After a couple of other little surprises – including a nice little ‘I’ll be right back’ moment from an ‘audience member’ – we settled in for some slasher fun. Watching in a group is really the only way to enjoy a 3D film, and there were plenty of giggles and groans as various things flew out of the screen towards us. Arguably, Part 3 isn’t a particularly exciting or memorable instalment in the franchise, but I thoroughly enjoyed this screening. Afterwards, we stepped outside the barn for drinks, food and a bonfire. However, this did give me the distinct impression that we’d crossed our horror subgenres. Huddling around the bonfire in the darkness of the British countryside felt more folk horror than summer camp slasher – I wasn’t scared of Jason at this point, but I worried that someone might have to be sacrificed to ensure next year’s harvest. Fortunately, everyone survived (I think) and we got back on the bus to head back to the festival venue. This was an excellent, fun event screening – perfectly organized and a great addition to the programme.
When we got back to the festival venue, it was time for another new film.
Tumbbad is a Hindi-language historical fantasy/horror with visual and narrative nods to the epic. The film begins with a narration of the story of the Goddess of Prosperity, and of her greedy son Hastar. The other gods attacked Hastar, but his mother saved him – on the condition that he was never worshipped and remained forgotten by humanity. But the village of Tumbbad did not forget him, and so they were cursed with eternal rains. The film’s story is divided into three sections. It begins in 1918, when Vinayak’s mother is servant to the local lord Sarkar. As well as tending to the house and Sarkar’s monstrous ancestor (seriously monstrous… she’s kept chained up in a basement), Vinayak’s mother performs sexual services for Sarkar – who is the father of her two sons – in the hope of acquiring one of Hastar’s gold coins. When Sarkar dies, she intends to leave Tumbbad for Pune, but her son has become fascinated by the possibility of discovering more of Hastar’s treasure. The story then moves to the 1930s, and the adult Vinayak’s return to Tumbbad and discovery of the treasure; the final chapter is set in 1947, when the now-rich Vinayak begins to train his son to extract the gold in his place. Storywise,
Tumbbad is a fable: Vinayak desires wealth, then he realises his desire, then he faces the consequences. But it’s the film’s visual style that really makes it. Lavishly rendered, with exquisitely detailed sets and location shooting,
Tumbbad is both sensual and disturbing. The eternal rains of Tumbbad village were very well done, to the point where you actually feel drenched just watching it.
Tumbbad is a classy and evocative period piece with a timeless fabulist moral.
And despite our best intentions, we were once again too shattered to stay for the last screening of the day. This time, we missed
Slumber Party Massacre (dir. Amy Holden Jones, 1982).
My next post will have reviews of the films we saw on
Thursday and Friday.
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